


All we ask is ventilation

by protaganope



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alex is from Florida because only there would he thrive in the modern day, Alexander Hamilton Being Alexander Hamilton, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Gang World, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bipolar Disorder, F/M, Gen, Hamilton tricked Burr into shooting him, I like Hamilton’s style in this its very whimsical. Musing. Bitter., Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, POV Multiple, Suicide Attempt, The style of writing is very Everything I Don’t Remember because I just finished that book, Therapy, vent fic like this is big emo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-02
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2020-04-06 08:20:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19058842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/protaganope/pseuds/protaganope
Summary: An alternate universe where Alexander Hamilton grew up in a modern day America, still did most of the things he did in canon, and is still just as depressed. But he doesn’t die. He can’t seem to.So he details his own story of his life, and how he tried to get Aaron Burr to murder him, to cover that it was the sin of suicide. Because here, Aaron Burr really is a terrible shot, and he misses. Still nearly kills him, but the wounds aren’t fatal.(This is an exploration of Hamilton’s depression and a character study of how his mind works.)





	All we ask is ventilation

**Author's Note:**

> Title: Drowning by Mick Jenkins

“I thought you were getting better.”

 

The words come out of her raw, choked, and Eliza stares past where Alex lies with narrowed, red-rimmed eyes. The hospital bed isn’t where he planned to end up, and the guilt threatens to gnaw into his stomach, hurting past the bandages, past the weakness of injury. And he feels like shit, anyway, because hey, that’s his wife.

 

He loves her so much it destroys him.

 

But, he couldn’t take this.

 

This, being, well, life. His meagre existence, his terrible career. It was too much. Infested were the tunnels he called his veins, the dirt and the mess and the dark had stolen him, taken his breath and refused to let him surface. So what can he say? There’s so many… things, in his head, but he, instead, just looks at her.

 

Eliza’s white as a sheet, and her face crumples at his lack of reaction. Her clothes are still black, still mourning, but wrinkled. She’d been here all night, she doesn’t say, but he knows. Her hair is an inkpot of untold story that Alex doesn’t have the pen for anymore. He wishes the colour (or lack thereof) was for him, rather than—

 

Rather than him. Him, who left such a chasm in everyone’s lives, he who could never wake. Forever in that blissful corridor of silence. What had Alex brought his family but forever multiplying debts to pay, borne from his own ambitions? It kept moving and moving and was too much to keep track of.

 

Alexander Hamilton often wishes he too could go to sleep and never wake. The buzzing has gotten stronger, these days.

 

“Aren’t you going to say anything, Alexander? How long-“ she reaches out, fingers hard and nails like talons. Except, talons isn’t quite the right word, for his Eliza has never been so cold, so predatorial. But she is bigger from his place in this carriage of near death, and his Betsey had always had a fire to her. No, her hand darts out as though each finger were licking tongues of hot flame, accusing and all the more painful in their sparking. “How long have you been planning this?”

 

He can’t answer her.

 

She lets out a sigh, and it sounds older than it should. Exhausted, bone deep. And Alex tries not to feel the guilt. He fails.

 

Eliza slumps into the chair beside his bed like the earth reclaiming a body, tries to compose herself. The doctor walks in. Says something about tests and how he’d have to attend some kind of mandatory whine sessions.

 

He dares to despair at how Burr was such a terrible shot.

 

* * *

 

It started when I was thirteen.

 

Wow, bet you hear that a lot, huh. Whole life story. You ever get tired of that? Sounds just like me, though. Bet I’ve even used that line before, it wouldn’t surprise me.

 

I’m changing the subject? You want me to continue? Sure, sure.

 

[Hamilton wrings his hands. He swallows, and I watch him in silence, waiting. He chuckles and picks up again.]

 

I’d been forging my mother’s signature for a while by then, and the neighbourhood hadn’t taken too kindly to me encroaching on their deals to make ends meet. Orchestrating a dead woman’s life was expensive, okay? Had to keep the rent paid. The lights. Electricity. Heating. Food.

 

This was before any of the bigger riots. Before the revolution and the old king got kicked off his throne. I knew it was coming, though, could feel it, skin deep.

 

Moving was easy. I packed a bag, loitered in the right areas, watched the skyline.

 

I always did have an attraction to trouble, and maybe that’s why I made fast friends with Mulligan.

 

We met trying to get into a party, of all things. Him and his friend Cato knocked on the door first, me hidden behind. Mulligan had been bigger, then. Sharper around the edges. Fresher scars. A girl had answered the door, and he’d stuck his boot through the threshold before she could shut it again.

 

I’d been around folk long enough by then to recognise the comfort in his actions. Didn’t care to ponder implications, result was result. Hercules collected cash, offered bodyguard services for their 1%, people who probably had their own people doing the same out of fear. Cato had brushed in second, a ghost, collected information from those too smart to even think about going near his boss. Smart. Pragmatic, honestly, but maybe that’s giving them more credit than warranted.

 

He’d had a good enough business running, Hercules, and he got me into the best gigs. I stayed there for a minute, slept on Herc’s couch. And that was tight for a while, if you ignored the state of the place. Covered in cigar smoke, the smell of young people making old mistakes. No one cared about the scrappy looking kid trying to swindle a couple dollars out of your purse. Or pocket. Or bra. Or-

 

I’m getting distracted again, let me continue.

 

I must’ve been seventeen when Hurricane Oliver hit Florida. You remember that, don’t you? One of the biggest storms for over two hundred years, of course you do. Anyway, we were- we were hit pretty hard by that. A good few guys stopped paying Herc’s business altogether, and some of the warnings he gave, they weren’t pretty. Stuff threatening your momma or your girl or whatever. There was one guy we got on his knees, actually, it was pretty funny, over the state of some of his dogs or something.

 

I’m sorry, that was pretty rude of me. I know they’re special to some people, and that’s okay. But what isn’t, is having to help Mulligan theft food from the store a few blocks away or face the consequences.

 

It’s not like that. We were friends. If only out of necessity. Hm. Close, then. Kinda hard to be equals when you’re basically half the other’s age and, well, he sure as hell wasn't a father figure.

 

In truth? At that point in my life he’d been the source of the closest thing to a family anyone could ask for, with a life like this. You know, I’d call him a weird uncle, but that’s moreso reserved for someone like Laf or Steuben. I guess Laf’s a cousin, if you’re getting into specifics; I have a few years on him myself. But he was tight with Hercules in a way that I couldn’t mimic. Maybe it’s the height.

 

Anyway.

 

It was through Hercules’ jobs that I met George Washington.

 

You like that, huh? I saw the way your face pinched. Yeah, that’s right. The big man himself, the not-so-living legend. The big G. Perhaps I should tell you the moments leading up to my planned escape, to make this fit better, give it some relevance. He was pretty high up on people who could’ve stopped me. But. Well. When I had started to give this thing any real thought (because this had been sat in my head all the way back on the island, if I had to estimate)...

 

Washington was dead, at this point.

 

It wasn’t like this was a surprise. I’d seen the signs.

 

If i were to wind back the clock, go back to where we first met, it was obvious even then. I had been young, then. Guess a statement like that isn’t any surprise to you, god, looking at you I bet you think I’m still in my prime, but that’s not the point. Washington was young, too. Though he hadn’t first looked that way. The man never had slept right, even then— especially then— and the maladies of his youth had not quite yet released their claws in his skin. Skin that was pale, scarred, skin that told a tale too painful for a kind soul such as his.

 

Washington had told me, one night when we had been alone and the alcohol he usually refused for himself had loosened his lips enough for proper discussion. His mother had kept him too close as a boy, had given his brothers proper education but trapped him to the house. She had grown either too old or too injured to have another baby, so bad resolved to keep him dependent for as long as she could. It’s a sad thing, a smothering of love. It’s the most efficient killer. Not just of a person, but their very being. I still remember the twinge of guilt for so often teasing the man for his poor literacy skills. But that’s my own, so it doesn’t matter.

 

I know what it was like, to be denied knowledge on a matter of birth. We bonded that way.

 

It was hardly his mother’s fault, really. Mothers love their children, no matter the way it manifests.

 

But that wasn’t the point. The point was for all he lectured me over the years for treating death like an old friend who makes himself at home and then you despair at in private because don’t have heart to throw him out, he kept the very same— death— as his consistent bedfellow.

 

He was always reckless, like me.

 

The man did not care if he lived or died, and all the responsibility he racked up was improvisation. And when he made mistakes, well, they hit him hard. He’d sulk for weeks, be a little sloppy with his handiwork, forget to take the safety on and off his gun. The thing was always loaded. Always heavy. Always in hand.

 

I saw him a little too often, head tilted down, hand on his gun like it was scripture. When he thought no one was around, the early hours, maybe, when the house was quiet and his office light was the only beacon of life around.

 

We were similar. He understood me as he did himself, and that was his failing point.

 

He saw me, warned me often with anecdotes I don’t remember from people far better than I’d ever be. Always was ready to remind me that I had no say in the path of fate. I always knew he sounded like a condemned man, and I guess I have the right to chant “I-told-you-so” over his grave, don’t I?

 

For all Washington’s power, he never did stop to think and learn how control himself. So he never could control me, either.

 

But like I said, the drinking and the fights and the stress, it showed on him. Didn’t help that he was so well known on the streets that everyone just started deferring to him. Like old man Franklin said, we followed him because he was the tallest guy in the room.

 

And people like us respect stupid, insignificant details like that. I even had the audacity to give him a piece of my heart as replacement for an absent father. Pathetic I know, but it was like I said. I was so young. Too young.

 

I wasn’t the one to find him. No, he didn’t have such a predictable end.

 

Martha did.

 

You see, he’d never had a stellar constitution, and a habit he had picked up from heaven knows where was smoking on the roof at all hours. Storm moved in, he didn’t. I remember the water tracks leading to his apartment. Man must’ve stayed in his clothes for hours after. His heart drowned, and his lungs couldn’t take it. He died soon after that. Pneumonia, or something. And, I guess— It’s a thing I’ve noticed, of course. It’s a pattern. Never changes.

 

Storms take everything from me.

 

* * *

 

Burr had the audacity to visit me this week. Only once, though.

 

Not in the conventional, societally acceptable way, of course, that was never his style. No, he came when I was sleeping. Probably not even through the nurses, he just let himself in and decided to start talking. Oh, how the tables have turned.

 

So Burr came to visit. And I’ve been doing well enough, so I had woken up at his voice and had actually been able to hold a conversation.

 

Burr hadn’t wanted a conversation. That much was clear. He hadn’t come to see me, not really. What he’d wanted, was to see the consequences of what he did. Like I didn’t exist as a person outside of what happened to me, the penalty for him letting go of that saintly restraint. Like I hadn’t drawn that side of him out, that I’d wanted it.

 

I’m forty-nine years old. I used to work for the government. I think I know how to manipulate someone into doing something and then make them think it was their own idea.

 

Don’t look at me like that. Seriously. Apparently it’s not my fault. I’m just a classic case of manic-depression. Got diagnosed the other day, and, can I just say that that was a surprise to absolutely no-one. I think the kids today are actually calling it bipolar, more recently, but using the old name seems more austere. More likely to make the person you’re speaking to squirm. Yeah, yeah, like that, that right there. The face.

 

As I was saying, this is what I’m good at. And when you’ve lived the life I have, you get good at learning how to die, too. I upheld my part of the bargain, Burr’s the one who let me down.

 

Speaking of, he was upset. Him. Like he was the one still stuck in this hospital. I don’t even have my own clothes here, and he rocks up in what has to be a suit worth at least a decent sized mortgage fund.

 

So we talked. He started blaming me for everything wrong in his life, terribly enough, which was entirely overkill. Boo-hoo, so you can’t get a job because everyone is convinced you’re a murderer and won’t let you explain it was actually a murder-suicide job and was therefore actually totally different. Turns out people hold grudges against things like that.

 

Okay, so maybe it is my fault Burr’s life has gone to shit.

 

But hear me out. All it took was one reminder of just who it was that pulled that trigger and he shut right up. It was funny to watch, you know. He turned grey under his skin and did something entirely uncharacteristic. Well. For the Burr I used to know. The one that doesn’t try to shoot to kill. (Stress on the try, I saw that look in his eyes. He didn’t mean to miss.)

 

He grabbed my by these scrubs’ collar, and hissed that he wished so, so deeply now, that he hadn’t missed. Then he left.

 

I called out after him.

 

Told him I wished so too.


End file.
